A 16-Year-Old World Record

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There's a list with the existing World Records and on that list you can see many that are quite old, some were set over a decade.

Olympic champion Dalilah Muhammad smashed one of athletics’ oldest world records when she stormed to the women’s 400 meters hurdles title in 52.20 seconds at the United States championships in Iowa on Sunday. source

Dalilah Muhammad is a 29 year old American track and field runner who specializes in the 400 meter hurdles.

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The old record was set by Yuliya Pechonkina in 2003. It is amazing how for 16 years no one was capable of breaking this record.

While I was researching things for this post, i came across the actual World Records list in athletics. It is surprising as there are some very old ones. I'm going to list a few here for you.

Men
100 m - Usain Bolt - 16 Aug 2009
1000 m - Noah Ngeny - 5 Sept 1999
1500 m - Hicham El Guerrouj - 14 Jul 1998
1 mile - Hicham El Guerrouj - 7 Jul 1999
2000 m - Hicham El Guerrouj - 7 Sept 1999
3000 m - Daniel Komen - 1 Sept 1996
5000 m (track) - Kenenisa Bekele - 31 May 2004
High jump - Javier Sotomayor - 27 Jul 1993
Long jump - Mike Powell - 30 Aug 1991

As I see, the oldest record was set by Tommie Smith (7 May 1966, 220 y (straight)). He must be really proud knowing he's still the best.

Records are broken every day, new records are set up almost all the time and there will come a day when records can no longer be broken as the human body is not capable of more. I've said this before and I'm saying it again, one day the maximum limit will be reached. Then what? Have you thought about that?

At some point there were discussions about starting from zero as old records were set in a different conditions. Rules were not as strict as nowadays and the list of banned substances was way shorter. I'm pretty sure doping was a regular thing. Just to give you an example, look at the Meldonium scandal. Before being listed as a banned substance, most of the athletes were using it without any problem. They were unlucky as it was listed as a banned substance sooner than it could be eliminated by the human body. That is why a bunch of athletes failed the drug test.

My opinion is that the Worlds Records list is not going to be updated very often in the near future but we'll see.



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